I am trying to classify all my music into quite broad genres. If you could only have ten or less categories for your music what would they be?Okay, I don't have any completely bazaar music like a Panda playing The Bamboo Flute or my own rendition of Mozart's 5th using bottles and spoons!!!

I love that this thread has gone on for 3 years and has at least as much validity as the day it was started.

For the record, I found this thread because I had essentially the same question and joined the board as a result...

I don't claim to have any particular mastery of the subject, but I see a trend developing that *should* lead to the 'actual development' of such a list - with the intent of 'actually attempting' in some meaningful way of 'creating some form of universal standard' out of it. (Take that 'Wishful Thinking').

It appears to me fairly clearly that 10 is too few for 'all music', but certainly not 'too few' for any 'one of us' specifically. That is to say, any of us can fairly easily identify each other's 'musical taste' from the list they provided, which by definition would indicate that the list is 'incomplete' - not 'bad', but certainly not 'all encompassing' either. So, each of us could potentially choose 'our 10' from a list of 30 or 40 that would make up the 'upper level' genre categories. We might have a little of this from 11 and a little of that from 12, etc., but we would each primarily use a 'portion' of the list for our needs.

It also seems very clear to me that any usable 'genre list' which would have any 'universal meaning' would need to have multiple levels of categorization otherwise, where, really, would we put 'Smokey Robinson' doing 'White Cristmas' on a 1963 Miracles Christmas album or Ry Cooder & Ali Farka Toure, Ry Cooder & Manuel Galban, Ry Cooder & V.M. Bhatt - and how would we relate them with one and other (yes,.. this relationship really is the ultimate purpose, otherwise, creating any set of 'categories' is basically pointless - we can define that using the definition of human perception and understanding).

So my idea is that we target a number (maybe 30ish) of distinct genre's and actually create a list to start from, and break that list down into subcategories - probably 3 deep (less seems too ambiguous and doesn't seem to help the purpose, and more seems a bit unweildy) though I have no marriage to this and might find that more depth in some areas is valuable whereas some areas may only require 2 levels.

One of the frustrating things to me - being someone who listens mostly to more 'commercial music' made in the past 5 decades is that I like to listen to 'Albums'. Not 'collections of songs, or 'playlists', but full-on, well produced 'albums' that work together as a unit. This doesn't necessarily mean that they are the same 'type' of music all the way through, or that they have the same performers or composers all the way through, but that they were made to fit together well and someone has taken the time to produce them well, with that idea in mind. Some of the *most extreme* examples that pop into my head are, for instance, 'Frampton Comes Alive', 'Dark Side of the Moon', 'Abbey Road' or "Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", but also the Soundtrack from 'Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?', or Eric Clapton's 'Unplugged' album, or even the Original Broadway Cast's recording of 'Hair'. Some of these are really great productions, but many of the same 'songs' appear in lots of different places with lots of different performers, some worse, some significantly worse, but also, some quite a bit better (Take Harry 'Mac' McClintock's recorded versions of 'Big Rock Candy Mountain' if you need an example here - with or without the introducing and fascinating, yet breif preceding dialogue).

In any case, I would enjoy trying to put such a list together and attempting to actually 'organize' the pack of free running pigs and kittens.... Clearly I am not 'musically qualified or knowledgable' enough to do it on my own, but a group might be fun... I know I would expect to learn a TON...

Being that I am here and have spewed forth my fantastic drivel,... I should probably contribute my, albeit frustratingly incomplete yet categorically disconnected personal list - as best I can...